Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to systems and methods that provide for alphabets to be input onto a handheld electronic device. Particularly, the present disclosure relates to systems and methods that provide for alphabets to be input in a plurality of Indian languages.
Description of Related Art
With the advent of smart phones and with substantial improvements in the technology necessary for telecommunication, there has been a substantial increase in the number of mobile phone users. Smart phone offer SMS (Short Messaging Service) in addition to standard voice communication facilities.
Further, in order to make use of the SMS, a mobile phone user (referred to as ‘user’ hereinafter) also needs to make use of a keypad which provides for the alphabets (characters) to be input. Since mobile phones are used by a multitude of users including those who read and write English, and those who don't, the operating systems of mobile phones were tweaked to include local language based keypads as well. However, the local language based keypads were mere extensions of the ‘QWERTY’ keypad, and such keypads are not tailor made to suit any of the Indian languages.
Mere extensions of QWERTY keypads are unsuccessful in providing a seamless typing experience, given the complex nature of Indian languages. Most of the Indian languages are complex in the sense that they contain alphabets which are a combination of vowels and consonants (also referred to as ‘vowel signs’, in the context of Indian languages). Typically QWERTY keypads are designed and equipped to display a plurality of vowels and a plurality of consonants. However, when a QWERTY keypad layout is altered with, in order to display Indian language alphabets, the layout does not turn out to be user-friendly and convenient since a QWERTY keypad never accounted for alphabets that are a combination of vowels and consonants.
Further, some of the Indian languages incorporate half-consonants. The phenomenon of half-consonants is absent in English, and an Indian language keypad derived from the QWERTY keypad cannot be expected to seamlessly incorporate half consonants. Further, most of the Indian languages also provide for vowel signs to be combined with consonants, and since English as a language does not allow alphabets to be combined with one another, providing such a feature on a (Indian language) keypad which is derived from the QWERTY keypad renders the (Indian Language) keypad complicated.
Further, an Indian language keypad which is derived directly/indirectly from the QWERTY keypad does not display all the vowels, consonants and vowel signs at appropriate and yet convenient positions, for the user to select the same.
Several Patent Documents including U.S. Pat. No. 5,387,042 to Brown, U.S. Pat. No. 5,378,068 to Hua and U.S. Pat. No. 5,212,638 to Bernath envisaged keypad layouts winch were created as a result of physical assignment or addition of different language characters to particular keys, and used various means to convert the keypad layout from QWERTY format to alternative formats. One of the disadvantages of aforementioned keypads is that they are not suitable in terms of aesthetics as well as ease of use, given the fact that they are dealing with vowel signs, half consonants which were not a part of the English language which formed the basis for the QWERTY keypad layout. Further, the existing Indian Language keypads did not incorporate predictive capabilities, which would have have enabled them to predict an Indian language word, subsequent to receiving a partial input from the user.
Additionally, providing for text to be input via an electronic device, in languages based on vowel-signs presents a multitude of challenges as for as usability is concerned. A part of the challenge arises due to the structure of the Indic scripts, which are derived from the Brahmi script. Mechanisms to input text in Indian languages have been used, but none of them have been user friendly considering the fact that the words of Indian languages are constructed using consonants, consonant clusters and vowels, vowels with diacritics, vowel-signs and half consonants.